Community @ The Turning Gate

Another odd thing. LR won't publish. It just hangs. But the odd thing I just noticed...

In BL publisher, I can see the one album. In the view album page /backlight/publisher/view_album/ I see the base settings for the album. I also see just one photo in the album.

If I go to the album listing at /backlight/publisher/list_albums it shows that I have four photos.

The LR publishing process isn't updating BL properly. This is the same problem I was having when I tried to clone the live site, and then update it.

So all paths I've tried have ended up the same. LR isn't publishing, and ends up corrupting the BL databases.

Nope - another fail. This was my last attempt.

This was a clean install. I started with an empty /backlight/ and an empty /photos/.

I got what I think is a working WordPress theme working, but I'm not confident considering all the other problems I've encountered. Still, I got it to a point it appears to be working, at least well enough I could try to publish some photos.

I setup LR. Odd that I point it at /backlight/publisher/ when there is no such path on the server. What ever...

I created an empty album and publish. I can see it on the web site.

I added one photo and publish. I can see that working on the site too.

I add a few more photos to the album and publish. LR hangs. No error message. Nothing in the ttg.log.

I quit LR and relaunch. I delete all the unpublished photos from the album.

I refresh the web page. I notice a second thumbnail was added to the album. There's no photo, just the second thumbnail.

So I look inside of the album's photo directory on the server. There is a second photo in there. But refreshing the web page never shows the second photo. I have to assume LR publishing failed after uploading one image. The file was uploaded, but the data files were not updated.

At this point LR will no longer publish anything. I tried adding a second image to the album. So it has one published image, and one new to be published. Clicking publish causes nothing to happen. I didn't even get the LR progress bar.

I give up and quit LR. I get a message than I would be canceling a publishing task.

I have no idea at this point how or if I can get BL2 to work.

I gave up on trying to update. I tried that so many times and spent so many hours. It always ran into a major problem.

Now I'm starting with a clean install. I've deleted BL entirely from the staging site, and all the photos. Clean slate.

I'm running into several problems going down this path too. The export from BL1 and import to BL2 has problems. It doesn't import all the old settings, and in some cases used the wrong settings.

I think I've managed to get all the templates and all the settings working at this point. I'm just now trying to test publishing from LR.

Actually, just getting the WordPress theme working has been the source of all of today's problems. I need that working before I move on to getting the rest of things working.

I just completed a clean install. I started with an empty /backlight/ and empty /photos/

I exported all the templates, and imported them into the new environment. I found this process doesn't let me export BL settings, uploaded images, or menus. After manually copying all of that into the new environment, I continued.

I found the WordPress templates did not import properly.

My WP pages were black on white, but the imported template is white on white. I'm still trying to find why text is white, instead of black. Several of the settings I've tried have not gotten me black text.

All the images are wrong. I had to go through each template and reset them.

The import process didn't include the template identifiers. So I manually set them.

Import process didn't set the template to my custom css or phpplugin files, so I manually set them.

So far I'm just trying to re-create the WordPress site. Hopefully when/if I can get that working, I can try once again to publish photos (and get that working).

This is the structure I've always had my WordPress and TTG site. I keep WP, Backlight, and Photos in separate directories and all at the root. There are a few reasons I do it this way. It works. I've set it up this way forever.

If you go to my domain, it opens in WordPress. It's reekes.net

Starting at the root, this is my file/folder structure on the server. This isn't every single file, but enough you can see the structure.

.htaccess (<- set by my hosting service and security plugin)
index.php  (<- points to /wp/wp-blog-header.php)
php_errorlog
php.ini
robots.txt
/cgi-bin/
/backlight/
   /admin/
   /cart/
   /client-response/
   /custom/
   /data/
   /designer/
   /framework/
   /modules/
   /publisher/
   /search/
   config.php
   env.php.skel
   index.php
/photos/
   /01-portraits/
   /02-faces/
   /03-inspired/
     (...plus 10 more albums)
   /99-models/ (<- this is an album set)
     (...includes 75 albums)
   /custom-thumbnails/
   autoindex.xml
   error_log
   gallery.xml
   setup.xml
   template_index.php
/wp/ (<- contains the entire WordPress install)

Maybe I can wipe Backlight entirely off the staging site, and all the Photos, then do a clean install. Then I can try to export all of the templates templates from the live site, and import into the staging site.

I assume the WordPress site could be broken until the Backlight folder is installed and all my templates are imported. I was hoping to avoid that since I have a dozen templates. But then, after I'm done developing them I guess I have to export/import them all from the staging site back to the live site.

Rod, basically your suggestions mean:

use the original root/.htaccess
delete root/photos/.htaccess (in fact the live site does not have this file)

My staging site is basically like this, as is the working live site, at the root:

/backlight/
/photos/
/wp/

But it's still not working. I still have problems with LR creating multiple copies of the same album, or hanging. I deleted all the albums again and started from zero, but again I ran into odd problems.

I'm following the instructions carefully. Maybe I'm a dumbass (I've witness this myself). I've gone through this 10 times, in various combinations. Mostly it fails straight away, from crashing the server to puking PHP errors to my web pages. Sometimes it starts to work, but then fails in odd ways. I've done many trail and errors. I'm not getting something.

I'm willing to do a complete fresh install as if I don't have BL1. But, i do have several templates I need to migrate. If I do a totally clean install, how can I migrate my BL1 templates?

If I can go that route, I need complete instructions on how to migrate BL1 to BL2 with WP themes. Something is missing in the instructions and I don't know where it goes off track.

Or, I can clone the old site (again) and try another update. Just realize that the BL1 to BL2 instructions are not complete if I'm also using WP themes.

What am I missing?

I only updated files within Backlight on the server. That was uploading from my local copy of BL to the server, via FTP.

My site has root/wp/ for all of the WordPress files which I haven't touched.

I have root/index.php which points to root/wp/wp-blog-header.php which is normal. That's how you bring up my WordPress theme and get to the home page.

I have root/photos/ which is where all the photos are published. It's always been that way, going way back to the first TTG release. I set the LR publisher to point at that directory.

There's hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/index.php within the local copy of the BL folder I get by unzipping the installer. The instructions don't seem to cover where that file should go on the server. It would make sense for that file to be at the root if you're not using WordPress. If you are using WordPress you don't want to wipe out your root/index.php

Comparing that hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/index.php with root/photos/index.php they look obviously similar enough. So that's where it belongs. It's the top of the tree for BL publishing.

I had tried an install without updating root/photos/index.php and had problems. Wiping the entire install and starting clean, I updated root/photos/index.php with hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/index.php

hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/.htaccess.php can't go to root/.htaccess because it would wipe out required setting to run my WordPress site. I've tried copying the rules from BL into my existing file. With or without the BL rules, the problem continues in the exact same way.

The only other copies of .htaccess I find to copy are:

hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/backlight/.htaccess.php to root/backlight/
hd/Backlight-2-Installer-107/backlight/installer/.htaccess.php to root/backlight/installer/

After several attempts, I could complete the BL update process. I ran through the db updates and installed the modules updates (WP and CRG addons).

At this point everything seems to be working. The WordPress theme is working, and the BL publisher is empty.

I setup LR publisher, pointing at root/photos/ just like I've always done.

I added one album in LR. I find the empty album on the server, and BL confirms it's there.

I add one photo to the album and publish. I find two copies of the album on the server and BL also reports there are two copies. Only the newest album has a photo.

I mark the photo to be republished and click publish, the server now has three albums, all with the same name. The first is still empty. The second only has a thumb, but no photo. The third has the thumb and the photo.

Adding a second photo to the album, publishing results in a fourth copy on the server and within BL. The previous copies are as they were. The fourth copy only has the second photo I added.

I've installed TTG and BL1 on sites before. With TTG I used my own WP theme, and had TTG publishing to root/photos/. When I updated to BL1, I also started using it for my WP theme and photos. I even developed all of that at a staging site as well.

I'm open to any suggestion on the implementation. I'll leave that to you guys. I'd also not want to crap up the UI by adding more complexity. The LR to BL interactions are already complex as it is. Personally, I would accept a PHPPlugin solution. I'd also like a metadata token solution (I'm already using it for captions).

Ben suggested a UI change in the publisher. It sounded like a 3-option choice. To keep the UI clean and simple, I'd go with the existing default behavior. Take the page title from the image title. If that doesn't exist, create on based on the file name.

Simply "clean" the file name to make it a better title. In my case, I create nicer file names during publishing such as "Nice-Name-001.jpg". So I would get a page title of "Nice Name 001."

You could make that the new default. Not sure how that might effect existing site's SEO. I actually think it would improve things, but I don't know of all the cases.

At most, maybe add a checkbox in the publisher. It would be something like "create clean titles from file names." Add that option next to the file naming option. This would simply strip out characters. Personally, I'd only use that option. So I'd vote you don't even need any UI.

I remember Matthew describing to me the individual photo page was mainly for SEO. That said, it would be great if we can improve on the photo page's title.

To step back and try to simply state the problem, the key pieces of data are:

page title
meta description
file name

I've found ways to bulk process the last two via publishing options, but not the title. File name I can set in the LR publishing option. I use the folder name to create file names and add a numbered sequence. The caption I can set with metadata tokens, and that's taken to create the meta description. But, I can only manually create a title. In my case I have well over 1000 images to process. So I'm looking for an automated way to manage this.

Ideally the title should be something unique, and plain (readable) text that's relevant to the image.

There are the metadata tokens, which I love. There is a special one for TTG that might be leveraged. It's the cell number token. Not sure if that can be leveraged to generate a title. I happen to use folder name and capture date to create captions. So maybe it's possible to create a title based on folder name and date, or even cell number.

But a simpler approach might be just to clean the file name and make that the title. It's better for SEO to have the the title match the file name (which becomes the permalink).

In the end, the goal is to increase SEO. That means getting a good title and description.

Ah, that only applies to one page.

What I'm looking for is a way to create unique titles for each photo's page.

What I get is every photo page in the album gets the same title as the album.

[double facepalm]

Yes, it was a typo. I was typing the path by hand, and got the file name wrong in my comment. It's actually correct on my server.

Then I figured out what was going wrong. I started by cloning my entire environment from production to my staging/development site. All files and the database. Everything is working as expected. So I'm good to go, right?

Then I added the #wpadminbar style to fuctions.php so I'd get an ugly orange admin bar in both the front and backend. Oddly, the style was never being added. I tried everything obvious, clearing cache, disabling cache, adding debugging code, etc. I never found any of the php code being called.

Then I noticed my other typo. One that had been in my main theme for a couple years. I never noticed it, but it was easy to miss. There's only one small piece of code in there that did next to nothing on a rare occasion.

If you can spot it, the second typo is mentioned above.

Sometimes the problem is too obvious. I'll crawl back into my cave. Let me know when it's safe to come back out, after the laughter is over.

Yes, I do use a BL child theme.

I only tried adding that code into the functions.php of the child theme. I'm wondering if that is even being called by the BL WP theme. There is the other one in the customizations folder of BL.

I was also thinking I could just add that css into styles.css of the child theme, but that also didn't work. That seems to indicate that file is also not being called by the child theme. I do have my styles in the customizations folder of BL.

Just now I saw there is a "custom css" field within the child theme's setting panel (within the WP admin). I pasted the style in there, and see the colored adminbar on the front-end. But that wouldn't cause the back-end to show a color adminbar.

I haven't spent more time on this, other than what I've mentioned above. I think functions.php and styles.css within the child theme's directory isn't being called.

This is probably documented. I haven't looked.